Captio AI
🦻 Accessibility + 💻 Productivity App

Hindi live captions and productivity tool for restaurants & cafes

For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Download for free

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Captio AI app showing live captions

Download for free

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Use Cases

Every situation covered

Designed for the real moments that matter — not just quiet controlled environments.

🍽️Dinner with friends

A noisy dhaba in Delhi or a restaurant table in Mumbai — friends talking fast in colloquial Hindi with regional accents mixing in. Captio AI captions each speaker in real time so a deaf diner can follow across the table.

💼Business lunches

A business lunch at a South Delhi restaurant or a corporate canteen — Hindi with English terms mixing in, proposals and timelines discussed over food. Captio AI keeps every exchange accessible.

Cafe catch-ups

A chai or coffee catch-up at a Café Coffee Day or a local café — quieter than a restaurant but rarely quiet enough. Captio AI captions whoever is speaking so a deaf person can contribute at the right moment.

🌍Restaurants abroad

Dining at an Indian restaurant abroad where waitstaff speak accented English or Hindi, or where the menu does not match what is available. Live Translator bridges any language gap in real time.

🎂Celebrations and group meals

A birthday dinner, Diwali gathering, or family celebration at a restaurant — many people, elevated noise, topics shifting fast between Hindi and English. Captio AI makes the celebration followable from start to finish.

❤️Dates and one-on-one meals

A lunch date or catch-up one-on-one — Hindi across a small table in a crowded restaurant. Captio AI lets you follow every exchange without making the accommodation visible.

Performance

Most accurate and fastest models

Hindi
92.6%

word accuracy

independent benchmark, 2025

< 200ms
you speak
captions

real-time captions

first word appears as you speak

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Captio AI in everyday use
Why Captio AI

Built for the table — however noisy the room

Follows the person across the table

Point the microphone toward the person speaking and Captio AI captions them through the background noise. You do not need to face them, watch their lips, or lean in.

Works through restaurant noise

Restaurant noise averages 80 dBA — well above comfortable conversation level. Captio AI is built for these real environments, not quiet controlled rooms.

Place it and forget it

Put the phone on the table between you and the other person, microphone facing them. You glance at it as needed. No adjusting between sentences, no managing the setup.

No asking for repeats during the meal

Every word appears in real time. If you missed something, the caption is there — you do not need to stop the conversation and ask anyone to say it again.

Any language

For restaurants abroad, multilingual dining companions, or waitstaff who speak a different language. Live Translator captions and translates in real time with no manual setup.

Discreet

A phone on a restaurant table is unremarkable. Captio AI runs quietly, the screen faces you, and most dining companions adapt naturally once they understand what it does.

Hindi

Why Hindi is hard to understand

Aspirated consonant pairs

  • Four-way contrast — three of four are invisible
  • Hindi has a four-way consonant contrast: voiced/voiceless × aspirated/unaspirated. The aspiration is produced by a puff of air after the consonant — invisible on the lips. At a busy restaurant table, the difference between 'phal' (fruit) and 'pal' (moment), or 'bhal' and 'bal', is entirely lost without acoustic support.

Retroflex vs dental contrast

  • Two series that look identical on the lips
  • Hindi distinguishes dental consonants (tongue against teeth) from retroflex consonants (tongue curled back). This contrast is produced behind the lips and is invisible in face-to-face interaction. Minimal pairs like /t/ vs /ʈ/ look the same from across a restaurant table.

Schwa deletion

  • Word shapes change at conversational speed
  • Hindi has systematic schwa deletion: unstressed inherent schwas in open syllables are dropped in fast speech. The word 'namak' drops its final schwa to become 'namk' in casual delivery. At a restaurant where conversation is continuous and fast, schwa deletion changes the visual envelope of many common words.

Hinglish code-switching

  • Hindi and English mix constantly in urban settings
  • In urban Indian restaurants — from Mumbai to Delhi to Bengaluru — Hindi-English code-switching (Hinglish) is the default. Speakers insert English nouns, verbs, and phrases mid-sentence without pause. A deaf lip-reader tracking Hindi phonology encounters English lip shapes without any signal that the language has changed.

Regional accent variation

  • Hindi sounds different across the country
  • Hindi is spoken across a vast geography with significant accent variation — Bihari, Rajasthani, UP, Pahadi, and Delhi Hindi each have distinct phonological features. At a restaurant table with companions from different states, the lip shapes shift from speaker to speaker without a consistent base pattern.

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The Challenge

Hearing loss in India: the scale of daily exclusion

India is home to an estimated 63 million people with hearing impairment — roughly 6.3% of the population — making it one of the largest deaf and hard-of-hearing communities in the world. The true figure is likely higher: India's 2011 census counted only those who are 'totally disabled' by hearing loss, systematically undercounting the many millions with moderate or severe impairment who navigate daily life without adequate support. Community-based studies report disabling hearing loss prevalence between 4.5% and 18.3% across different regions.

India's language policy for deaf and hard-of-hearing people has historically prioritised oralism — lip-reading and spoken language — over sign language, which many schools discourage as a visible marker of deafness. A 2014 study found that 19% of deaf and hard-of-hearing schoolchildren aged 6 to 13 were out of school entirely, far above the national average. For adults, the gaps are equally stark: interpreter provision is scarce, accessibility in restaurants and public spaces is almost entirely absent, and the 63 million figure represents people navigating every meal, every conversation, and every public interaction largely without systemic support.

Captio AI captions Hindi conversation in real time, so a deaf or hard-of-hearing person can follow a dhaba dinner in Delhi, a family restaurant gathering in Mumbai, or a business lunch in Bengaluru without asking others to slow down or repeat.

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Privacy

What you hear stays with you.

Gone the moment it ends

Captio AI processes your audio in real time and discards it immediately. Nothing is recorded. Nothing is kept.

Not a product

Your conversations are not something Captio AI sells, shares, or monetizes — to anyone, for any reason.

Not used to train anything

What you say in a doctor's appointment or a job interview never ends up in a training dataset. Not ours. Not anyone else's.

100% PRIVATE

Private by default

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Reviews

People love Captio AI

"Restaurant dinners in Delhi are always loud and always Hinglish. I used to follow maybe half. Captio AI follows the full mix — Hindi, English, and everything in between. I finally contribute properly at meals."

Priya S. 🇮🇳
priya.s***@gmail.com
Delhi, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"Business lunches were the hardest. Fast Hindi, aspirated consonants, regional accents — impossible to lip-read at a noisy table. Captio AI changed everything. I don't miss the critical detail anymore."

Arjun M. 🇮🇳
arjun.m***@gmail.com
Mumbai, deaf since age 8

"The chai catch-up at a noisy café used to be something I dreaded. Everyone talks fast and code-switches constantly. Captio AI handles the Hinglish and I have real conversations again."

Kavita R. 🇮🇳
kavita.r***@gmail.com
Bengaluru, sensorineural hearing loss

"Indian restaurant in Southall — Hindi all around, fast and accented. I placed Captio AI on the table and followed every conversation for the first time. The family was genuinely surprised."

Rohit V. 🇬🇧
rohit.v***@gmail.com
London diaspora, bilateral hearing loss

"Restaurant dinners in Delhi are always loud and always Hinglish. I used to follow maybe half. Captio AI follows the full mix — Hindi, English, and everything in between. I finally contribute properly at meals."

Priya S. 🇮🇳
priya.s***@gmail.com
Delhi, moderate bilateral hearing loss

"Business lunches were the hardest. Fast Hindi, aspirated consonants, regional accents — impossible to lip-read at a noisy table. Captio AI changed everything. I don't miss the critical detail anymore."

Arjun M. 🇮🇳
arjun.m***@gmail.com
Mumbai, deaf since age 8

"The chai catch-up at a noisy café used to be something I dreaded. Everyone talks fast and code-switches constantly. Captio AI handles the Hinglish and I have real conversations again."

Kavita R. 🇮🇳
kavita.r***@gmail.com
Bengaluru, sensorineural hearing loss

"Indian restaurant in Southall — Hindi all around, fast and accented. I placed Captio AI on the table and followed every conversation for the first time. The family was genuinely surprised."

Rohit V. 🇬🇧
rohit.v***@gmail.com
London diaspora, bilateral hearing loss

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Have a real conversation through the noise in Hindi.

Captio AI is free to start

Download for free

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